Manzoor Pashteen, a leader of the the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, addresses a rally in Lahore on April 22, 2018. Credit: Khalid Mahmood/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Apr 26 2018 (IPS)

“If I’m assured that my home and my village has been de-mined, I’d be the first to return with my family,” says 54-year old Mohammad Mumtaz Khan.

Khan lived in the mountainous village of Patwelai in South Waziristan, a rugged territory in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) near the Afghan border, one of the world’s most important geopolitical regions. In 2008, he shifted to Dera Ismail Khan in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province with his wife and six children.

They had to leave Patwelai hurriedly, “with just the clothes on our backs”, after the Pakistan army decided to launch a major ground-air offensive to cleanse the entire area of the Taliban.

Mumtaz Khan lost his foot to a landmine in his home. Credit: Khan family

Since then, the military carried out a series of intermittent operations across FATA till 2016, when they claimed they had destroyed the Pakistani Taliban’s infrastructure in the country.

That same year, in 2016, the army gave the internally displaced persons (IDPs) — over half a million — a clean chit to return to their homes. Feeling lucky, Khan and a few dozen men decided to visit their village and assess the situation before returning with their families.

It was while he was entering his home through a window that he accidentally stepped on a landmine. “There was a boom and before I could fathom what had happened, I saw my bloodied left foot,” Khan said.

“I am lucky that I got away with a small injury. It may not be so the next time around,” he said, adding that the mountains and valleys are “teeming” with improvised explosive devices (IED) and explosive remnants of war (ERW).

“Despite having cleared the area of militants, it is not possible for many to move about freely as the place remains infested with landmines,” agreed Raza Shah, who heads the Sustainable Peace and Development Organization (SPADO), an active member of the global Control Arms Coalition and International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). Since 2010, SPADO has been blocked from working in FATA.

After the demand by the Pashtuns earlier this year during their long march to Islamabad, the authorities promised they would start de-mining the area.

Not everyone is convinced, especially since the accidents continue. “It is not just a daunting task, but a painstaking, expensive, and risky one and the government is neither equipped with the technology nor does it have the huge human resources needed to comb the vast area,” said Gohar Mehsud, a journalist from the area who has covered the issues of the FATA extensively.

“The military should have cleared the area of mines before letting the tribes return,” said Mohsin Dawar, one of the people behind the newly formed Pashtun Tahafuz Movement which is day by day gaining strength. He pointed out that among their demands was to ask the military to send more teams of bomb disposal units to comb the area and clear the place.

Recalling his tragedy, Khan narrated that he was carried down the mountain to the main road on his nephew’s back for a good two hours, all while bleeding profusely. Once they reached the road, he was tied onto a motorbike and taken to the nearest health centre where he was administered basic first aid. “All I remember was the excruciating pain I felt throughout the journey that seemed never-ending,” he said.

Meanwhile, another cousin had arranged a car to take him to the nearest hospital in D.I. Khan. All in all, the journey took a good nine hours before he reached the hospital.

His injury, like those faced every day by countless others residing in the area, highlights a problem that this conflict has left behind. It also shows an utter disregard for civilian life. Dawar calls it nothing but “criminal negligence” on the part of the Pakistani army.

According to Mehsud, the bombs may have been laid during the conflict by both the army and the terrorists. He discovered a landmine in his house a couple of years back after his family returned to their village in South Waziristan.

“We have been after the army personnel to send someone to defuse the bomb but so far nothing has been done,” he said. For now they have placed stones around it and continually remind their family members not to step anywhere near it.

According to a SPADO spokesperson, the area along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan is heavily mined. “But that area is also heavily fenced with no civilian access; it is marked too.”

The scattered cases of injuries and casualties have occurred only because the mines may have slipped from their position due to rain. On the other hand, in FATA, the landmines are used as an offensive not a defensive weapon by both the military and the militants and are therefore unmarked. “They are even found inside school compounds, homes, and agriculture fields,” said Shah of SPADO.

“I don’t care who planted these bombs; the military carried out the operation in our territory and I hold them responsible for clearing it,” said Dawar.

Shah agreed that mine clearance was the responsibility of the military corps of engineers. He fails to understand why, if the bomb disposal units were so good and sent on missions abroad to clear mines, why not make their own country safe first.

He added that if the military initiated a full-throttle de-mining, it would be the easiest way to win the hearts and mind of the tribal people. “They will gain confidence that the army is there to protect their children,” he said.

“The army has started to cover some ground in South Waziristan, but it needs to be more proactive and engaged and begin this in earnest in the rest of the agencies,” said Mona Naseer, co-founder of Khor Network of tribal women, who belongs to Orakzai agency where a kid was recently injured by stepping on a mine and fatally injured.

These injuries come with a life-long economic cost. For the last two years, Khan has undertaken cumbersome travel  from D.I. Khan to bigger cities like Peshawar and even down to Rawalpindi, in the Punjab province, from one doctor to another, each giving their own opinions. “I have spent over one million rupees on my leg, but still walk with the help of crutches,” he points out helplessly.

Along with losing his limb, his job, and his home, Khan has lost the purpose of his existence. His life, he said, has changed completely. “I’m now a  cripple, imprisoned at home and dependent on others for help. I cannot ride a motorbike, cannot go to the market, have to ask others to help me in the bathroom…everything that I should be doing myself.” Khan doubted he would ever manage to go back to his village given the rugged mountainous terrain that it is located in. The former school teacher is now limited to tutoring students at home.

Pakistan is not the only country facing a landmine problem. While it is impossible to get an accurate number of the total global area contaminated by landmines due to lack of data, landmine watch groups estimate that there could be 110 million landmines in the ground and an equal number in stockpiles waiting to be planted or destroyed. The cost to remove them all is 50 to 100 billion dollars.

According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines network, more than 4,200 people, of whom 42 per cent are children, fall victim to landmines and ERWs annually in many of the countries affected by war or in post-conflict situations around the world.

A global Mine Ban Treaty known as the Ottawa Convention (which became international law in 1999) has been signed and ratified by 162 countries. It prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines (APLs). Sadly, Pakistan is among the countries (United States, China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, and Russia) that have have not signed the treaty and is among both the producers and users of landmines.

In  2016, the Landmine Monitor report placed India as the third biggest stockpiler of APLs in 2015 after Russia and Pakistan.

Last year, Sri Lanka acceded to the Antipersonnel Mine Ban Convention and set a deadline to be free of landmines by 2020. “Sri Lanka’s accession should spur other nations that haven’t joined the landmine treaty to take another look at why they want to be associated with such an obsolete, abhorrent weapon,” said Steve Goose, arms director at Human Rights Watch and chair of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines – the group effort behind the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty.

But Shah said that unless India agreed to accede, Pakistan will not take the first step. “Perhaps the way to go about it is to bring the issue on the agenda during peace negotiations and when talks around confidence building measures take place between the two countries,” he said.

SPADO is also the official contact point of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC). It openly advocates for the universalization of the Mine Ban Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Along with FATA, accidents due to landmines are happening in other places in Pakistan. In 2017, according to SPADO, among the 316 injuries and 153 deaths in total, Pakistan-administered Kashmir recorded seven; Balochistan province 171; FATA 230; and KPK 61.

A majority of the injured and dead were men who were found either driving, fetching water, taking livestock for grazing, rescuing others who had stepped on a bomb, passing by etc. Children were usually playing outside when they chanced upon a shiny object, like a “disc-shaped shoe polish box” hidden in the grass which they attempted to pick  up.

“The figures that SPADO has collected  includes only those that were reported in the media and are just the tip of the iceberg,” Shah emphasized.

He said there was an urgent need for a national registry where such a record is kept and a more comprehensive rehabilitation programme is instituted.

“Taking care of the injured and maimed is expensive and long term,” he said, noting that when the victim is a child, for example, he or she will grow and require new prosthetic limbs. “While the army takes care of its own, unfortunately, there are very few institutes where civilians can go and seek help,” he said.

Afghan election auditors at the Independent Electoral Commission in eastern Kabul. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
KABUL, Aug 20 2014 (IPS)

A knife fight late Tuesday among several auditors at the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) still inspecting the results of the presidential elections held in mid-June could be the stab in the back for what has been a painful election process.

The vote audit process was resumed following a three-hour delay on Wednesday, a commission official said.

Two months after Afghans voted in a second runoff for election of the country’s president, ballots are being recounted amid growing questions on who is really arbitrating the process."What we see is what we expected: an endless fight between the two sides as each ballot is disputed” – Thijs Berman, chief observer of the European Union

The four corrugated iron barracks east of Kabul that constitute the centre of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) of Afghanistan in which the 22,828 ballot boxes are piled up, have become the Afghan insurgency´s main target.

In the June 14 runoff, presidential candidate Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai won 56.44 percent of the votes, while his opponent, Abdullah Abdullah, received 43.56 percent, despite having been the most voted candidate in the first runoff on April 5.

The turnout was equally surprising: eight million out of 12 million voters, an unlikely figure given that most polling stations were reportedly empty on election day.

With Abdullah Abdullah’s allegations of massive fraud having put the electoral process on the brink of collapse, the two candidates were persuaded to agree to a full ballot recount.

In an audit that started mid-July, the ballot boxes are being examined by a team formed by auditors of both candidates and members of the IEC. Afghan as well as European Union observers are also on the spot in a process closely monitored by U.N. assistants.

“I have spent the last two weeks taking part in this massive farce,” Abdullah Abdullah´s auditor Munir Latifi told IPS. “The United Nations and the Independent Electoral Commission are working together so that Ghani takes the win but there´s nobody supporting us,” he said before returning to his seat.

Latifi has to discuss whether the handwritten “V”, “X” or a circle on each candidate´s tick box is repeated in several of the ballots, or if it is really “one person, one vote”. Boxes suspicious of fraud are put in quarantine and records are taken by hand in a notebook.

Resources may look scarce but Shazad Ayubee, a Pashtun from Paktiya in southeast Afghanistan and one of Ghani´s auditors, told IPS he was “a hundred percent” satisfied with the process, although “things would be smoother if Abdullah´s auditors didn´t struggle to delay the publication of the results by any means necessary.”

Similar handwriting among different ballots “doesn´t necessarily imply fraud,” he added. “In the most remote villages of Afghanistan almost everybody is illiterate. Families simply show up at the polling stations and the one who can write marks their ballots,” explained Ayubee during the lunch break.

The most suspicious ballot boxes are those that arrive unlocked, the ones that boast over the maximum of 600 ballots, or even random objects such as traditional felt hats or tobacco packets. Many auditors claim that full boxes arriving from Taliban-controlled areas should be systematically discarded because the Afghan armed opposition consistently prevents the population from taking part in elections.

But Ayubee says he knows the reason behind the unexpected turn out in Taliban strongholds: “Unlike Pakistani or Uzbek Taliban, the Afghan Taliban told people to vote for Ghani because he is a Pashtun – a majority of the Afghan insurgents belong to that ethnic group. Everyone knows that Ghani will defend their interests much better than a Tajik like Abdullah Abdullah.”

Mid-morning, Noor Mohammad Noor, spokesman for the IEC, appears in the press room opposite the barracks and starts his speech with a “sincere commitment to democracy” as opposed to “unfounded rumours and lies over the development of the audit.”

The IEC spokesman describes a “joint effort of 220 IEC workers, 305 auditors for Abdullah, 306 for Ghani and 1014 international observers.”

Asked by IPS whether the auditors are skilled in graphology, Mohammad showed no sign of hesitation: “This is a process under the close guidance of the United Nations, which displays 50 advisors on a daily basis. Besides, it´s the United Nations which has the last word over the ballots.”

Final decision

Speaking to IPS by phone from his office in Brussels, Thijs Berman, chief observer of the European Union, told IPS that it was “too early” to take stock of the process. “What we see is what we expected: an endless fight between the two sides as each ballot is disputed.”

Commenting on the fact that the United Nations was acting both as adviser for the electoral process and as arbitrator in the recount, Berman said that “in countries like Spain or Holland we would have relied on a fully external body but in the case of Afghanistan we are dealing with very young institutions that do not yet have a significant credibility.”

“I agree that the U.N. role can be criticised, but what is the alternative,” he asked before reiterating that the E.U. delegation is determined to conduct its work “even in the case that the United Nations does not fulfil its part.”

Despite repeated calls and emails from IPS, the U.N. spokesman only agreed to respond to a questionnaire sent via e-mail. Jeff Fischer, senior international expert on elections and head of the U.N. Independent Electoral Commission advisory team, labelled the scale and scope of the audit as “unprecedented in the history of the United Nations.”

He stressed that all the auditors had received training on IEC procedures and invalidation and recount criteria before they could start working as advisors.

Regarding rumours concerning alleged U.N. backing for the Pashtun candidate, Fischer was blunt: “Final decisions as to whether votes are valid or invalid are taken by the IEC Board of Commissioners.”

Confusion over who has the last word in the audit grows while pressure from the outside strives to break the poll deadlock.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has recently warned that the alliance will be forced to take a decision regarding the withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan unless the new Afghan president signs the security agreements.

According to Rasmussen, the NATO summit scheduled for September 4-5 in Wales would be “very close” to a deadline for taking that decision.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Students at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
KABUL, Jun 26 2013 (IPS)

Despite impressive advancements in enrolment rates, media reports of gas attacks on girls’ schools, shoddy books, and a lack of classroom facilities continue to mar the reputation of the education system in Afghanistan.

Many locals feel that landmark developments such as the enrolment of roughly eight million children – 37 percent of whom are girls – compared to the 900,000 exclusively male students enroled under the Taliban go largely unreported.

Other, less obvious changes, such as the gradual removal of references to war and violence from school textbooks, have also escaped media attention, said former human rights commissioner Nader Nadery.

Nadery, current chairman of the Free and Fair Elections Foundation, told IPS that between 1996 and 2001, boys-only schools functioning under the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan studied material that actively promoted violence.

In mathematics classes, for example, he said word problems included such scenarios as: “If you shoot a gun and the bullet travels at X speed towards a soldier standing 500 metres away, how long does it take to kill him?”

According to Nadery, tireless work by human rights bodies led to a revision of these texts between 2006 and 2007 to include, among other things, gender-sensitive references that replaced such passages as: “The boy was playing football while the girl was carrying water and washing dishes.”

Education Minister Spokesman Amanullah Eman told IPS that youth now learn about hitherto taboo subjects like tolerance and the dangers and diseases associated with drug-use.

English and computer skills are also taught in government–funded religious schools, which Eman says about two percent of children attend, including some 15,000 girls.

And whereas “religious instruction was given in Arabic under the previous regime, we have now translated all the books into the two national languages: Dari and Pashto,” he added.

The past few years have also seen rapid growth in the number of private institutes of both basic and higher education.

One of the best known is the Kardan Institute of Higher Education, which was founded in 2003 by four Afghans in “a single room when there were no other private institutions in the country,” said Hamid Saboory, a legal expert and consultant to the university.

This alternative to traditional institutions like Kabul University offered short courses in finance, management and business administration and is now one of the most highly respected of the “over 70 private institutions registered with the ministry,” he told IPS.

In rural areas, however, educational facilities and services can be difficult if not impossible to access. Some remote areas rely on lectures transmitted through TV to compensate for the lack of qualified vocational trainers, Nadery said.

Meanwhile, in the northeastern province of Kapisa, at Al-Biruni University, a number of girls in the law faculty complained to IPS of frequent power outages, and going days without running water in the dormitories.

Still, the presence of so many young women in the law faculty, hailing from such far-flung provinces as Farah in the west to Jowjzan in the north and in many cases coming with the blessings of their fathers, is an encouraging sign of slow but sure change.

Payvand Seyedali, former executive director of Aid Afghanistan for Education (AAE), echoed this observation, but stressed the need to change a law that bans anyone who is married from enroling in the public school system.

“This has serious implications,” she pointed out, “for girls who are married at 13,14, 15…who are essentially (forced) to drop out of school.”

However, AAE schools that cater specifically to this population found that many husbands, brothers and fathers were often the ones encouraging their female relatives to stay in school, “sometimes even making that a condition of the marriage,” she told IPS.

A researcher on ethnic bias in Afghan textbooks who asked not to be named sounded a word of caution about the complexities of creating an “inclusive” education system in a country of 35.2 million people, of whom 42 percent are thought to be Pashtun, 27 percent Tajik, nine percent Uzbek and nine percent Hazara.

He found that 100 percent of the references to people, groups or dynasties in eighth-grade textbooks are all Pashtun, a pattern that is repeated in other grades as well.

Other inconsistencies in the curriculum include gaping holes in national history. For instance, the last 40 years of the country’s history were left out of high school social science textbooks, a decision supposedly motivated by the desire to “promote national unity”, according to the government.

Asked about this move, Technical Education and Vocational Training (TVET) Deputy Minister Mohammad Asif Nang said that all parties to the bloodiest part of Afghan history could be impacted by mention of the 32 years of war.

“People from the Communist regime, from the Taliban regime, from the Mujahedeen” are still alive, and their children could end up fighting one another, he said.

The deputy minister stressed, “Every day we build five schools. Every day we have activities for teachers (to gain more skills).”

He lambasted an overly critical media that jumps on flaws in the system and exaggerates their impact.

What the country needs during this phase of state-building, he said, is more support, correction of mistakes and adjustments to and reform of the system, a process that risks being derailed by negative media.

Actresses in the recent production of Khushal Khan Khattak, staged in Peshawar, Pakistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Apr 5 2013 (IPS)

The Taliban may have placed a ban on theatre, but women in Pakistan’s northern provinces won’t allow the threat of the militants’ reprisals to keep them off the stage.

Meena Gul, a 32-year-old who made her debut in the recent production of Khushal Khan Khattak, a play based on the life of the 17th century Pashtun warrior poet who promoted Afghan unity against the backdrop of Mughal rule, is one of these determined young actresses who has found her calling and will not give it up without a fight.

Although television has long been her passion, she tells IPS that her brush with theatre proved to be a “welcome development in my decade-long career in ‘showbiz’.”

Directed by the award-winning Masood Ahmad Shah, the play offered 15 actresses with varying degrees of experience the chance to perform for a live audience, a challenge for those whose careers had revolved around pre-recorded TV shows.

The stage “demanded more focused work”, Gul said. Unlike with TV, which allows you to repeat a shot numerous times, theatre provides just one chance to do justice to endless rehearsals and hours of working with a director to capture a scene or a specific role.

Gul began her career with Pakistan Television and is something of a local screen star, but she feels the theatrical debut “emboldened and encouraged” her to seek more performances and rely on acting as a livelihood.

She says the Afghan government will soon be staging the same play in Kabul and Kandahar, where she will play a leading role. She and her fellow female performers are anxiously awaiting the trip, during which they hope to make lasting connecting with women on the other side of the border who suffer the same gender and cultural repression under the Taliban.

When the play was first staged in Peshawar, capital of northern Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, in early March, it elicited praise for building “cultural bridges” between the neighbouring countries.

Khushal Khan Khattak was renowned for his writings that spoke to a deep sense of Pashtun identity and unity.

The largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the second largest in Pakistan, Pashtuns share cross-border cultural ties and commonalities, the most recent being the twin experiences of living with – or under — the majority-Pashtun Taliban.

Now, the play promises to foster solidarity among Pashtun women, who often bear the brunt of the Taliban’s extreme religious, patriarchal views.

Playwright Noorul Bashar Naveed told IPS that the 15 actresses who performed in his play have “breathed new life” into the world of drama, which was withering under the boot of this male-dominated society.

“The majority of the people here don’t approve of women venturing out in public due to social repercussions. It is not acceptable for women to appear in films, dramas or theatrical productions,” he says.

But the public’s reaction to the play suggests a change in this old view. Families, friends and supporters packed the 600-seat Nishtar Hall in Peshawar, the largest theatre in KP, on all three nights of the play’s run. Each performance received a standing ovation, with applause ringing out long after the curtain call.

“The women in the audience gave us immense strength, which greatly improved our performance,” Shah Naz, who played Khushal Khan Khattak’s housemaid, told IPS.

The play’s overwhelming success is no small feat in a place where even male actors hesitate to accept roles out of fear of the Taliban’s wrath.

Not only actors but other artists, too, frequently come under attack here.

“Taliban militants have destroyed 500 CD and music shops in KP and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) since 2005 and have been warning (people) to away from acting,” Javaid Babar, president of the KP Artists Association, told IPS.

Babar says that about 200 actors, dancers and actresses were forced to leave the profession in 2008 when the Taliban officially labelled drama and films “un-Islamic”.

“In 2009, the Taliban executed the famous dancer, Shabana Begum, in Swat and hung her body from an electricity pole, which prompted (many artists) to stay home or leave for other cities,” he added.

Public performances are few and far between in northern Pakistan. The last play, on the life of Pashtun poet Rehman Baba, was staged in December 2012.

As a result, few actors have been able to secure a livelihood.

“Most actresses come from poor families,” Babar said, and often “lead miserable lives” because they are prevented from pursuing their dreams.

Many are forced to take up odd jobs to pay for their daily expenses, since acting is not sufficient to pay the bills.

The production of Khushal Khan Khattak offers some hope of change. Shah Naz says she received 350 dollars for her role, while Meena Gul took in 500 dollars for her three-night performance.

Recognising its potential, both the Pakistani and the Afghan governments are taking steps towards ensuring the play continues to run, and travels across borders.

Parveen Malal, Afghanistan’s cultural attaché in Peshawar, has asked the cultural department of the KP government to stage the play in the Afghan cities of Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar, predicting that the actresses will receive a “wonderful response” from art-lovers on the other side of the border.

Masud Ahmed Shah plans to change the script slightly to cater to the local audience in Afghanistan, and cast some Afghan women in female roles in an effort to cultivate unity between the women.

Pakistani officials believe the play could help change social stereotypes about women. Sultan Hanif Orakzai, secretary of the culture and information department of KP, who watched every performance at Nishtar Hall, says the play was part of government efforts to “spotlight services rendered by different Pashtun heroes…bring women to the stage and encourage families to enjoy cultural events together.”

Production costs totaled roughly 30 million rupees (about three million dollars), and were borne entirely by the provincial government.

He says the play enabled the audience to empathise with the strong female character, Khushal Khan Khattak’s steadfast wife who stood by him in the most trying times, enduring even his imprisonment during the reign of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb Alamgir, and could lead to greater understanding and appreciation of women as independent individuals.

“I will remember the strong female characters for a long time to come,” Saeeda Babi, who watched the play with her three children, told IPS.

(END)